One of the most important things you can do as a blogger is learning how to evaluate a website to maximize it's potential. Evaluating your progress is something that every business needs to be able to do, yet many of the people that I see on a regular basis never do. As a blogger, you also need to be able to measure that evaluation. Sadly, many bloggers don't have any way to measure where they stand because they haven't clearly defined any goals for their blog.
Start Setting Goals For Everything
So, before you jump head first into blogging, you should slow down, think your way through the problem and define what you want out of your blog.
Are You Blogging For Money?
If you are running a business blog, or you are a Professional blogger, then you need to define how much you want to make for a living. You also need to define your business model.
Blogging is NOT a business, it is a marketing tool for your business!
As you move forward, once you have your income goals in mind, its a matter of knowing the numbers game to figure out what you need for your business.For example its a pretty common formula to figure out how much you can earn from your blog:
(Traffic) x (Conversion Rate ) x ($ per Customer) x (# of Transactions) = Payday
Once you apply this basic formula, you can see how much money you can potentially earn. You can also see where to make adjustments in order to increase sales ( you either need to increase the traffic, the conversion rate or the amount you earn per customer)
So, to apply this formula, lets take some numbers that are actually pretty common for a total newbie.
lets say you have 50 visitors per day, and can convert a .5% to sales. Lets say you are promoting a couple of ebooks with a $17.00 commission, and you can get an average of 1.5 transactions per customer (if you are building a list, you can generally get more transactions per customer on average, which is why list building is so popular).
So to apply the formula for 1 week, you would have:
350 ( visitors)x .5% (% of visitors converted to sales) x $17.00 (avg $ per transaction)x 1.5(avg transaction per lead)=$44.62/week in sales that you can expect to generate with these numbers.
So, if you want to increase sales, you have to increase one of the numbers. Applying this formula will help you learn how to evaluate a website and gain new leads and sales into your funnel.
Most people focus on increasing traffic. However, you could just as easily focus on increasing revenue (finding higher ticket items to recommend, creating more products, etc…) or increasing the conversion rate ( a good conversion rate for an average affiliate site, once you learn the tricks, is 1-2%).
As you can see, learning how to evaluate a website to increase profitability is really all a numbers game, and knowing which numbers to focus your efforts on at any given time.
Are You Blogging For Popularity?
I know some people who are just blogging to get to know people, and want to get their name out to people within a given niche. If this sounds like you, then you need to define how many visitors per day you want, and give those people direction to keep them coming back for more. Learning how to evaluate a website that is built on popularity, like entertainment sites, can be a little more tricky.
Whatever your reason for blogging, if you have something that you want to achieve, then you first have to start by setting clear and concise goals for everything that you want to achieve. These goals become the targets for your action plan.
How to Evaluate A Website Once You Know What You Want
Once you have your goals set for your blog, you also need to continue by evaluating things, both the positive and negative aspects of what you are experiencing.
The other day, I was talking with a client who was so stuck on positive thinking that they wouldn't look at any of the negative aspects of what they were doing. As we talked, they absolutely refused to even consider that there were things going on that they didn't like. It wasn't that they didn't have any problems, (after all, that is why they called me in) it was that they didn't want to face them. It seemed like they just wanted me to tell them it was all okay, and keep doing what you are doing.
Now, I am all for positive thinking, and not dwelling on the negative things in your circumstances. At the same time, when you refuse to even acknowledge the negative circumstances, you will struggle to improve.
Growth comes from identifying and learning from our mistakes, and if you refuse to look at your mistakes, you won't be able to grow from them.
The people who do this often delude themselves and fall into the habit of blaming others for their own failures, or shrug them off and continue making the same mistakes over and over again.
How to Evaluate a Website: 4 Steps to Greater Achievements
In order to learn how to evaluate a website, you have to be willing to look at the 4 steps to evaluating challenges. I do this after every major event (webinars, product launches, email campaigns, contests, etc…) and evaluate how I could do it better next time:
Identify the Positives- Give praise and celebrate the victories achieved!
Identify the negatives – look realistically and list each problem that cropped up
Identify how you could have avoided or changed the outcome– this is where you analyze and grow from the mistakes
Identify more positive points that came from the negatives and celebrate them- Everything that goes wrong has something good that comes from it. being able to identify these and ending on a positive note helps you to keep from falling into depression and despair.
Don't dwell on the negative things that happen in your business, however look at them, and evaluate what you could do in the future to avoid them. In order to do that, I recommend following this 4 step guide on How to Evaluate a Website. It will help you improve how you look at yourself and at your business.
You can learn how to set up goals in Google Analytics to help you evaluate a website and track ROI in this video from Ms. Ileane.
How do you improve your business? What are you doing to evaluate your progress and make the most out of your business?